
Before remote work made the digital canvas feel inevitable, Shardin helped build one from a practical annoyance in Perm. His second act trades sticky notes for screenplays, while keeping the same fascination with how people understand one another.

A boy who rehearsed newspaper pitches at a tram stop built an infinite canvas for more than 100 million people. Fifteen years later, his neatest diagram has become his hardest decision.

He started with a profiler annoyance and spent the next 17 years turning impatience into infrastructure. ClickHouse is now a global company, but its CTO still thinks like the boy who wanted the computer to draw one more circle.